IVOR HELE EXHIBITION: Carrick Hill, Springfield.

It must rank as one of the most picturesque views on the Fleurieu Peninsula - as the Willunga Hills make their way down to the vineyards of McLaren Vale.

And for many years this part of South Australia was home to one of the nation's most celebrated artists, the late Sir Ivor Hele. As Jane Hylton, Curator of the Ivor Hele exhibition currently on at Carrick Hill explains, the way he captured it on canvas in the 1960s gives us a true appreciation of how this area once looked before the cereal crops gave way to the vine.

"I love this painting particularly because of that thrust of late afternoon light. The landscape down there is something that many artists in South Australia have reacted to but in this particular work in the hills I think Hele almost imagined that there was a figure lying under there that might suddenly come to life."

"And there's a beautiful painting over here of Blanche Point?"

"Oh this is a stunner. Again you get that sense of the muscular feel of the landscape. And that sense that a figure might rise out of it. It's extraordinary difficult looking down on that cliff face and then to actually put the seagulls over the top to give it that sense of scale I think is really a remarkable achievement. It's really, I think one of his best landscapes."

The rugged Aldinga coastline and the beautiful Willunga Hills were Ivor Hele's artistic backyard. But despite his love of this landscape he painted it infrequently. Much of his life and art were consumed by the ugliness of war with Hele becoming the Australia's longest serving war artist. And his capacity for such work was spotted at an early age, when General Blamey saw the painting, depicting the explorer, Captain Sturt's decision to turn back from the desert having failed to discover Australia's mythical inland sea.

Jane Hylton: "General Blamey saw this and saw that he was very much a competent figure painter and he was instrumental in pointing his name forward as a war artist. That really changed his life and that's the area that he's best known in terms of Australian art and the history of Australian art."

It was Hele's ability to capture the mysteries of the human form and his love of the portrait that also brought him to national prominence. Ivor Hele completed more commissioned works that any other artist in the history of Australian art and soon Prime Ministers like Robert Menzies were beating a path to his home at Aldinga.

"There's that lovely photo of Mr. Menzies at the front gate at Aldinga and that's a classic example of the man having to come to him and not the other way round?"

"Fantastic, and that great figure of Menzies in that great big coat shaking hands with Hele who doesn't actually want to come out and be in the photograph particularly because he shunned any kind of publicity. He really didn't like it."

But despite his reclusive nature the accolades for his wartime art and his portraits kept rolling in. For a man obsessed with the human form and the human face.

"He became after that one of that of the most sought after portrait painters in the 50s. But more than that in the 50s he won the Archibald Prize five times which is absolutely astonishing. He said quite late in life in the sixties in an interview that there was nothing to him more beautiful than the human face and the human figure and that these would keep him occupied for the rest of his life. They did effectively."

The exhibition, "Ivor Hele: the Productive Artist" is on show at Carrick Hill until the end of June. If you have any further questions please email info@postcards-sa.com.au